Technology

Web site awards and trust certifications

Back in the 1990’s, when the Web just got popular, it seemed like every more or less large web site had to have a bunch of awards. Awards were the first web promotion tricks that I’ve learned of. Anyone could establish his own award. All you needed was a little image that looked like a medal or a star.

Awards were demanded by the “big guys” who wanted to show how “special” they were. And they were often taken advantage of by really small guys, who were making the awards, and used them to promote their own “award giving” web sites.

Then there were so many web awards that nobody cared about them anymore. And it was quite for some time.

The new wave started with trust certifications. Lots and lots of people on the web were followed by all sorts of scammers, spammers, crackers, hackers, and what not. Many got worried and afraid. So, the certification boom started. Trust of that, protection of this, guarantee of something, warranty of something else, etc.

Surprisingly, after all these years, so many web sites still use this non-sense. What is even more surprsing is that so many of them are prepared to pay money (and huge money in some cases) to get the award or certification. Why? That’s really beyond me.

How far is a desktop from a server?

There is an interesting post at The Open Source Advocate blog – “Win the desktop, and you will win the server“. Tristan Rhodes, the author of the blog, suggests that in order for an operating system to conquer the server market, it should first conquer (or fight reasonable well for) the desktop market.

I have to admit that when I just read the article, I felt almost like agreeing. But something kept buzzing me from the inside, so I kept that tab open for a few days. Now that the post was processed at the back of my brain, I have to say that I don’t agree with that point.

There is, of course, a correlation. Once sysadmins start using something they like on the desktop, it’s pretty soon that they try to see how well that thing handles server tasks. So, of course, people using Windows on the desktop were checking out how to make a server out of it.

But. I don’t think that conquering the desktop is the only way to the server. Not at all. There are more ways, I somehow feel that those other ways are actually simpler. For one thing, Linux has never been particularly good with desktops. However, only the stubbornest and the most ignorant of sysadmins will argue against Linux server superpowers.

Furthermore, real sysadmins (which are, of course, in the minority) clearly understand the differences between a desktop computer and a server. What’s good for one might not be so good for the other.

And then there is this whole “enterprise” issue. Big companies (aka “enterprises”) aren’t about desktops. They are about support services, customizations, and having someone to blame. If there is someone on the other end of the twisted phone cord, they’ll grab him with both hands.

The historical examples in the Open Source Advocate’s blog post might be related or they might not. The times were different anyway. But even if these examples are related, they aren’t as heavy as they seem. There are many factors to consider (prices, distrubution, documentation, hardware requirements, etc).

What do you guys think?

Fedora 9 : before and after

I have recently upgraded my laptop to Fedora 9. Those of you who come often to this blog or follow me on Twitter, know that I’ve been waiting for this release like for nothing else. Two technologies in particular – KDE 4 and Firefox 3 – were the center of my focus. Of course, I could updated them separately and tried them earlier, but I wanted to follow the path of the distribution.

The upgrade itself went fast and easy. But starting with the first reboot, I was getting more and more negative towards the new release. While booting for the first time, I got two messages, notifying me that wpa_suppclient service and CUPS daemon failed to start. While I don’t care much about printers, wireless connectivity is vital for me, so that was a bit discouraging.

The login screen. It was changed quite a bit, and I didn’t like it much. Logging in. Somehow I ended up in Gnome, even though my desktop environment was KDE for the last 7 years or so. Logout. Switch into long awaited KDE 4. From the first look it was beautiful, even though not quite for my tastes. Surely, I’d need to reconfigure and change a few things. Not a problem for me at all – even more fun so.

Continue reading Fedora 9 : before and after

PHP 6 – hopefully not the end of the road

I’ve heard plenty of positive buzz about PHP 6 in the last few weeks. Yes, it’s coming out. Yes, it brings quite a few improvements, including better Unicode support, better security, and more help for larger projects through namespaces. However, I hope that it won’t be the last PHP release, since there are so many other things that need fixing.

Here is a good overview, as compared to the best programming language ever – Perl. But this probably reminds you of a famous Euro-English joke, no? But I do miss sigils and proper hashes. I’d love to see better memory management when programming objects. I’d love to see improved database interfaces with prepared statements and database abstraction layer. I would really welcome a cleanup in function names and return values. I … I … I … I hope that PHP 6 is not the end of the road, and that PHP 7, PHP 8, and PHP 9 will follow.

4 Mbps with PrimeTel

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.